[vinit.merchant]

Originally Posted by aashishnb

So, one gives you (potentially) long term stability as compared to other that gives (potentially) immediate cash/benefits. There are many who are in between, various levels of grey, so to speak.

Each to its own !!! Its more like shared gain&pain (Lala) vs hire&fire (non Lala).

Lala company also has it own unique set of issues where HR is sort of non-existent and employees have no place or avenue to raise their concerns. Control is usually exercised by limited number people, mostly 1 or max 2. And everything depends on the whims and fancies of this one person - doesn't matter if it is right or wrong. Moral & Professional ethics are non-existent too.

After working for over a decade in one such company, I would say the grass is greener on the other side. Took a toll on my confidence levels too. I quit that company in 2021 and now work for a captive unit of a MNC service provider.

There are many who are in between, various levels of grey, so to speak.

Most are in between I would say. 80% if not more.
And this in between is the best of both worlds

[AZT]

Interesting data point in today's mint article. I hope someone verified this as of 2023 and it's not outdated being rehashed.

The IT companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, LTIMindtree, and Cognizant, which have high exposure to US banking institutions, may be impacted if the turmoil in the banking sector worsens.
The BFSI contribution to the revenue of these IT Companies is above 25 per cent, according to earnings reports.

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/...387397711.html

[IndieGooner]

Originally Posted by vinit.merchant

Lala company also has it own unique set of issues where HR is sort of non-existent and employees have no place or avenue to raise their concerns. Control is usually exercised by limited number people, mostly 1 or max 2. And everything depends on the whims and fancies of this one person - doesn't matter if it is right or wrong. Moral & Professional ethics are non-existent too.

True. A so called Lala company in a non-unionised sector like IT can end up being extremely toxic. A friend of mine used to work in one such place with a long term founder-owner who was the supreme being and decision maker over all aspects. Per my friend, this guy's response to any one who dares to resign was pure vitriol. His stand was - "I'm not going to acknowledge your resignation.. Do want you can.." My friend had to seek intervention from a big shot politician to get his relieving letter and experience certificate!

[airguitar]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I don't think anyone needed that assurance. It is quite well known that getting into FAANG companies is hard. There is a cottage industry out there training people to crack FAANG interviews.

But the point is, what do you do after getting in? Apart from collecting salaries and enjoying the perks. If these companies are collecting talent merely to deny them to the competitors, how does one put a number on the productivity of these folks?

Kudos to you for saying it out as it is. I haven't worked at any of the big tech companies but know a lot of people that are currently working there; and many of them were mentored by me when they were with me on their previous jobs and perhaps weren't all that outstanding. At some point, to get to these companies, they steadfastly focused on the interview questions and prepared like we all prepared for important/difficult entrance exams. Many of them used these companies as a "salary correction" step and then once corrected went back to other firms for another dose of correction or to do what they loved doing. Folks shouldn't get carried away that the compensation that market offers is a measure of their abilities to deliver things for their employer over a long time or even a measure of their skill levels on a given subject. One's success in answering well-documented questions ( however difficult ) in an interview is a measure of their levels of practice; not of their IQ or their ability to deliver good solutions over time. Sometimes, it feels like a court jester who has been hired; fun, witty and intellectual entertainment guaranteed by having them around, but overall value to the kingdom is unclear. Enjoy while it lasts!

In fact, Mr. Pichai himself admonished his employees not so long ago on lack of productivity https://www.ndtv.com/business/google...tivity-3223962

However, I want to point out a small subset of people : those that are top notch at what they do ( by experience and by learning a skill to the correct depth ) , good track record of delivering, and also highly paid. This is the subset that people should aspire to be part of. Good at what you do but also have a knack of milking the market.

[voldemort]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I don't think anyone needed that assurance. It is quite well known that getting into FAANG companies is hard. There is a cottage industry out there training people to crack FAANG interviews.

But the point is, what do you do after getting in? Apart from collecting salaries and enjoying the perks. If these companies are collecting talent merely to deny them to the competitors, how does one put a number on the productivity of these folks?

That's an unfair assessment.

There's a difference between "IT", and "computer science". The MAANGA/similar companies (henceforth refered to as MAANGA+) do the latter. They invent stuff after a lot of research (searching on stackoverflow is NOT research) and advance the field as part of developing products to sell.

It's like the difference between a car manufacturer and a taxi company. One creates cars. The other drives that car around and makes money. I'm not saying one is better than the other; I'm merely pointing out that there's a difference though both are involved with "cars".

Take Google as an example — they came up with search, emails were not great until Gmail, Gsuite applications are used the world over, Android is ubiquitous, and plenty more.

Now let's go a level deeper — how do you make collaborative document editing work well when there's hundreds of users involved? Millions of users continuously collectively edit millions of files all day every day across timezones worldwide — how do you design infrastructure to handle all this? (Hint: what works for 10 users editing 10 files wouldn't scale to millions of users) [1] [2].

Also — I bring out this example because I'm personally interested in compilers, interpreters, programming language theory (PLT) etc — they invented multiple programming languages. It's not a trivial thing to do. There's a beautiful article [3] explaining why they invented Go (C becomes hard to scale unless every developer involved is extremely careful — Go is designed such that the it's by design impossible to make mistakes one might make using C) Go language is well established at this point. Dart admittedly hasn't gained as much traction, but then again it's targeted at a niche.

Now let's talk FB. I don't believe they're saints, but they nevertheless have impressive engineering prowess. Ever wondered why they invented GraphQL? At FB-scale, traditional API handling techniques just wasn't enough. They also came out with React and React Native.

While some may argue the example products mentioned above are just the fad of the day, those tools save a lot of people a lot of time. Thousands of "IT companies" around the world use those tools to make web and mobile apps for their clients.

Similar story with other MAANGA+ companies. They do cutting edge research (I haven't even touched on the AI stuff) and invent stuff which rest of the industry piggybacks off.

(Whether the output from these companies help improve the world is a different question that needs to be separately addressed.)

Originally Posted by airguitar

Sometimes, it feels like a court jester who has been hired; fun, witty and intellectual entertainment guaranteed by having them around, but overall value to the kingdom is unclear.

Let's not belittle those engineers.

These companies' hiring processes aggressively filter out the false positives (unfortunately a lot of true positives also gets filtered out in the process). Focusing on the interview questions only gets you past the first couple of levels. Eventually you'll reach a point where you'll have to talk algorithms, runtime efficiencies etc. Because over there, time and space complexity matters!

People who make what are essentially glorified CRUD apps all their lives wouldn't understand.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com...ble-osdi06.pdf

[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com...r-osdi2012.pdf

[3] https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article
--------------------
I wrote this post in good faith with the hope that discussions around this (and other related topics here) would be more civil and respectful despite our differences in opinions. At the moment I see people talking past each other which is unfortunate considering one can get valuable insights from the collective perspectives of different members here with varied backgrounds.

[NiInJa]

Originally Posted by voldemort

There's a difference between "IT", and "computer science". The MAANGA/similar companies (henceforth refered to as MAANGA+) do the latter. They invent stuff after a lot of research (searching on stackoverflow is NOT research) and advance the field as part of developing products to sell.

Thanks for beating me to this

A lot of folks are generalizing 'IT' industry here and applying general principles across everything that is related to 'Computers'.

These MAANGA+ companies and a lot of startups innovate/create a lot of stuff from scratch. Many a times it is not visible to end users, but helpful for developers or a specific set of users. Go Lang is a recent example, Python is an old example. Nobody will care to appreciate how it has changed the way applications are developed, but there is some real work that was done to reach this point.

Innovation or converting an idea into a working product requires a level of intelligence and skillset which can be rare. Many people yearn to achieve that level and try to get into these companies so they can learn new skills, collaborate with best the brains there. What is wrong if they have to 'study like college entrance exams' to get into such organizations then ? I have seen a couple of my college friends trying hard and finally succeeding to get into one of these organisations.

Innovation comes with a risk, sometimes a product won't work or an idea won't succeed, a lot of time and money can get wasted. Most developers are well aware of it.

Then there are lean phases when developers have to sit idle but when the need arises, these companies have to make sure they have the right talent available from day 0 to work on it. It is all part of the game.

A friend of mine works in Bell labs in U.S. He mentions that there are times when he questions his existence, but when they start working on something (his recent adventure being 5G network related innovations), they know no one else has the skillset to do it. How do we put a number for their productivity during such easy days ? When thousands of people sitting in a stadium go live on facebook in full HD using 5G network, you know something great has been done by a few folks in the background, and these folks might have been sitting idle for some time as well.

On startups and VC funding I think this:

Originally Posted by shankar.balan

It is sad that owing to the greed and indiscipline of a few individuals and companies and the ruthlessness and manipulation of some questionable VCs and PE’s, the whole industry is just reeling with body blow after body blow.

... summarizes everything perfectly. I have seen two close friends working in MAANG and startup where a lot of money is pumped in for innovation. It all boils down to how that money (and business) is managed.

Organization's valuation is decided by the 'value' that a product will bring, hence it can be enormous at times. Think of Byjus, the value of this product is that they can make education accessible to anyone with a Smartphone and 4G connection till the existence of humankind. How they manage the money pumped in by VCs and deviate from their goal that leads to the mess they are in today is a different story.

Based on my talks with these guys, I echo their opinions that VC funding is not necessarily a bad thing, the money is needed when you want to convert an idea into a product. You want to have an office space, infrastructure, money for operational costs, and at times, pumping money to change user habits or bring them on-board (example: Ola/Uber offering cheap fare in their initial days). It also requires the best brains, people who are ready to sacrifice personal life till the product is released, and such individuals mostly don't come cheap.

I have seen my close friend and his ex-manager start a new company in Singapore and how they struggled initially and finally after 5 long years they are readying themselves for an IPO. When you have seen their work, their struggle, their intelligence and their skills closely, you know they deserve a payout that we can discuss endlessly over here.

There will always be cases where salaries will be negotiated and people will jump ships at the first opportunity, after all, it is all about supply and demand of skills, we all know that

[airguitar]

Originally Posted by voldemort

That's an unfair assessment.

I wrote this post in good faith with the hope that discussions around this (and other related topics here) would be more civil and respectful despite our differences in opinions. At the moment I see people talking past each other which is unfortunate considering one can get valuable insights from the collective perspectives of different members here with varied backgrounds.

Look each of our way of articulation style maybe different and some of the comments may have had appeared harsh. The goal wasn't to belittle anything, far from that.

Let's have an open dialogue here and I will start with listing some innocent questions here, keen to hear your views

1. While I agree with the "greenfield" research and solutioning that many of the firms are working on, what % of the engineers we are speaking of/hired at high prices would actually be part of those type of work. Many of the highly paid people that I know are not into niche skills.

2. How is it that folks that are average/slightly above-average otherwise suddenly are seen as "extreme high potentials" when they are hired at some of the firms that we speak of (that justify the compensation).

Again, I repeat, our articulation styles could be different; there is no sarcasm in any of what I asked. I realize the subective nature of my questions, but let's try to answer it in the group as much as possible.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by voldemort

That's an unfair assessment.

There's a difference between "IT", and "computer science". The MAANGA/similar companies (henceforth refered to as MAANGA+) do the latter. They invent stuff after a lot of research (searching on stackoverflow is NOT research) and advance the field as part of developing products to sell.

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Thanks for beating me to this

A lot of folks are generalizing 'IT' industry here and applying general principles across everything that is related to 'Computers'.

These MAANGA+ companies and a lot of startups innovate/create a lot of stuff from scratch. Many a times it is not visible to end users, but helpful for developers or a specific set of users.

Sorry, how is this relevant? As a product developer for 30+ years, I have designed/developed multiple generations of compilers, SQL engines, hyper-scaling high-availability application frameworks, high-performance telephony systems, etc. So I know the difference between computer science, IT services and ITES.

But you haven't explained how this all justifies MAANGA+ hoarding bunch of talented engineers and letting them lay on bean bags sipping hot java watching their RSU vest. If someone is not working, I don't care how brilliant they are. Their productivity is still zero.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Take Google as an example — they came up with search, emails were not great until Gmail, Gsuite applications are used the world over, Android is ubiquitous, and plenty more.

What? I was using email for 11 years before gmail was launched. Email was fantastic in 90s, when international calling was very prohibitive. It was like getting electricity for the first time. Have you heard of hotmail, yahoo mail? BTW, Google didn't come up with search. First prominent web search engines were webcrawler and alta-vista, I used them extensively. There were things like archie prior to web browsers, but that was a different world.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Now let's go a level deeper — how do you make collaborative document editing work well when there's hundreds of users involved? Millions of users continuously collectively edit millions of files all day every day across timezones worldwide — how do you design infrastructure to handle all this? (Hint: what works for 10 users editing 10 files wouldn't scale to millions of users) [1] [2].

No big deal, my work always involves distributing computing since the mid 90s. So I have designed such systems.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Also — I bring out this example because I'm personally interested in compilers, interpreters, programming language theory (PLT) etc — they invented multiple programming languages. It's not a trivial thing to do.

I have designed a language in 90s for Healthcare (HL7) domain, built compiler and testbed for it, and it is still under use after 25 years. I did that before one could search for ready answers on the web or stackoverflow. This is before xml/json was available. These days it is as easy as creating a xml/json schema and use some opensource parser.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Ever wondered why they invented GraphQL? At FB-scale, traditional API handling techniques just wasn't enough. They also came out with React and React Native.

No, I don't need to wonder. Such things organically happen when no ready made solutions are available. I had to create my own distributed high-availability architecture prior to Kubernetes. Most small product companies create such internal products that never reach the masses because they don't have the budget to evangelize such opensource project to broader world. Prior to opensource, there used to be crazy amount of internal products in each product companies that never got out. Opensource reduced that repetition by a huge number.

Originally Posted by voldemort

People who make what are essentially glorified CRUD apps all their lives wouldn't understand.

I wrote this post in good faith with the hope that discussions around this (and other related topics here) would be more civil and respectful despite our differences in opinions.

If you are posting in good faith, then don't call rest of us glorified CRUD developers. CRUD developers rarely sit back and get paid for doing nothing, unless they are waiting for the next assignment. Meanwhile your MAANGA+ are specifically hired to do nothing as many recent articles report.

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Innovation comes with a risk, sometimes a product won't work or an idea won't succeed, a lot of time and money can get wasted. Most developers are well aware of it.

That risk is taken by the company, what risk is taken by the developers?

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Then there are lean phases when developers have to sit idle but when the need arises, these companies have to make sure they have the right talent available from day 0 to work on it. It is all part of the game.

No, that's not the case here. The news articles clearly mention that they were hired so that other companies can't get them. They also create artificial demand for engineers, forcing wages to increase across the industry.

Originally Posted by NiInJa

A friend of mine works in Bell labs in U.S. He mentions that there are times when he questions his existence

I too worked in Bell Labs 30 years ago when it was still part of AT&T. Even then they were famous for wasting money on fancy projects that had no customers, and they would compete with other SBUs of Bell Labs. But we worked on interesting projects, we weren't hired to deny our talent to other companies.

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Organization's valuation is decided by the 'value' that a product will bring, hence it can be enormous at times. Think of Byjus, the value of this product is that they can make education accessible to anyone with a Smartphone and 4G connection till the existence of humankind.

Tell me how they are better than Khan Academy which has been doing such stuff since 15 years, for free? Byjus is a scam primarily ripping off middle/lower income families.

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Based on my talks with these guys, I echo their opinions that VC funding is not necessarily a bad thing, the money is needed when you want to convert an idea into a product.

After co-founding two companies over 2 decades, I have bit more nuanced opinion on this, which I have explained here.

[androdev]

Originally Posted by airguitar

1. While I agree with the "greenfield" research and solutioning that many of the firms are working on, what % of the engineers we are speaking of/hired at high prices would actually be part of those type of work. Many of the highly paid people that I know are not into niche skills.

The hiring policy is always to keep the bar very high irrespective of the job profile because staff tend to move across departments. It would be a bad idea to hire a less competent engineer at a lower salary based on his/her immediate assignment that can be done by less competent staff. You are hiring for the company and not for the project. A less competent employee hired today will hire a dozen future employees who are even less competent.

Unreasonably high salary situation is always created by VC funded companies that have no power to pull top talent except by luring them with high salaries which has the domino effect on rest of the market. Companies like Google, etc. have a much more scientific approach to compensation that is based on the market conditions and their requirements.

2. How is it that folks that are average/slightly above-average otherwise suddenly are seen as "extreme high potentials" when they are hired at some of the firms that we speak of (that justify the compensation).

Well, that's how branding works. If you are capable of getting a job in such companies or getting admission into prestigious universities, you have demonstrated some potential and that will be a plus for career progress. Kind of obvious, isn't it?

[Chetan_Rao]

A 'ready to deploy' bench and 'at least nobody else can deploy them' bench are not the same thing.

Former needs a viable project pipeline, budgeting justifications and a bunch of hoops to jump through.

Latter only needs a deep pocket and some sort of monopoly to protect, which eventually fails anyway because pockets are bottomless now, there's always someone else willing to throw more (of someone else's) money at the wall.

Until a market scare happens (frequent these days) and everyone quickly sheds the passengers.

Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

[no_fear]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Meanwhile your MAANGA+ are specifically hired to do nothing as many recent articles report.

My school friend works at Youtube / Google with an inflated title and a salary.

His exact job - he writes a monthly report on how many videos were uploaded in Youtube that do not meet the viewing criteria, and if the videos were blocked. He works 2 hours a day, WFH, and spends the rest of the time playing online poker with his work mates and indulging in vices that are now legalized in US. And he told me there are hundreds like him in the FAANG space, who literally work on projects like this. Some are not even working - just building the next dream.

My brother's school friend worked on Google Glass - the first version. Then he sat around, and wrote songs during lock down for 2 years while employed with Google, worked on glass again and now back to chilling, since the Glass project is shelved.

I can understand that not everyone is productive, but when it becomes a trend, where companies just recruit people like Pokemon cards (as some articles mentioned), then there is something seriously wrong with the industry.

Meanwhile, ordinary folks face the brunt of living costs. I got a job offer in San Francisco Police Department - I turned it down because my pay could not cover my rent. I would have to commute 2 hours every day just to find affordable housing. I was hired to work with the federal drug task force to combat the growing opoid / narcotics epidemic.

Was my job less impactful to society than someone working in FAANG? That's the perennial dilemma.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by no_fear

And he told me there are hundreds like him in the FAANG space, who literally work on projects like this.

I got a job offer in San Francisco Police Department - I turned it down because my pay could not cover my rent. I would have to commute 2 hours every day just to find affordable housing.

Thanks for these 2 great examples! This shows how the 2 are related in a housing market like SF. The inflated salaries in such industries certainly skew the real estate market. Has happened in Bangalore as well and also causes resentment among those not directly benefiting from/employed by the IT industry.

But speaking for Bangalore, the city certainly has a lot more money to provide public facilities now than it did when I was growing up. Still not enough to cover the entire population, still not as good as it should be (but that is mainly because of Government and BBMP corruption!), but a lot better than it was in the 80s and 90s.

Originally Posted by no_fear

Was my job less impactful to society than someone working in FAANG? That's the perennial dilemma.

No dilemma, the job you had to turn down would have been far more valuable to society.

But again, I ask- is it not the responsibility of the government to find ways to channel revenue from those high-paying companies and from highly-paid individuals better and more effectively into those roles and departments that are more vital to society? Is this anger (not expressed by you, or your post, of course), while understandable, misdirected?

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by voldemort

There's a difference between "IT", and "computer science" ... MAANGA+) invent stuff after a lot of research

Sorry, we should not causally relate CS with R&D and IT with "Apps". This is nothing but just a "feel good" perception which front rankers of any JEE would like to believe. In reality, either is possible (and happens) in any camp.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Take Google as an example — they came up with search, emails were not great until Gmail, Gsuite applications are used the world over, Android is ubiquitous, and plenty more.

Google did not come up with search. Page Rank algorithm was a research project at Stanford. Larry and Sergey's advisors had other theses on that as well. Sure, Google contributed a lot to its evolution, but they did not invent it. Their main advantage was moving early, since page rank works that way.

Email too existed well before Google. I work in Email Cybersecurity, I can confirm that even today 90% businesses use Office 365 for their email solutions. GMail is popular only among personal users, that too because of the platter of other services you could quickly get access to, like Drive/ Youtube/ Sheets etc. I do attribute this "convenience" to Google, which Microsoft took years to learn but is now finally catching up.

Android? It was acquired by Google in 2005. If Google is really so inventive, did we get any single-board computer OS from them that they optimized for ARM like Android? They even stopped working on Chromium OS because Chromebooks did not yield so much revenue.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Now let's go a level deeper — how do you make collaborative document editing work well when there's hundreds of users involved? Millions of users...

You are talking of distributed systems. They existed much earlier, even in the 80s when Larry and Sergey were in school. If you are interested to learn its history, I can recommend an online course on Cloud Computing from a reputed University apart from the classic Tanenbaum textbooks (not just Distributed Systems btw, some are applicable to OS and Networks too). The patterns existed, including the challenges. The only difference is traction that it gained recently, owing to cheap less powerful systems (scale out vs up).

Originally Posted by voldemort

Also — I bring out this example because I'm personally interested in compilers, interpreters, programming language theory (PLT)

Then surely you know that Go was also "invented" by Rok Pike and Ken Thompson. They would have done so even if they were with another firm. Just like Guido would have invented Python even without working for Dropbox. There is no causal relationship.

Certainly we cannot link the achievements of the stalwarts who are authorities by themselves, with low-experienced (but high-paying) recruits. Even if such a recruit worked on a standard Go library function, the frameworks (or interfaces) must surely have been in place which they just "applied". Coming back to your "Ford" vs "Uber" analogy, designing interfaces are done by guys like Rob and Ken, and writing a method is its application. So the abstraction delta exists there too, and we cannot erase it just because they both get payslip from same firm.

As for "PL targeted to niche" - we could go hours discussing on that heavily OT, but I'd just say that a good programming language is one which is easy to learn (but may have a learning curve to master), most people can work on with easily available libs, and one which respects backward compatibility. Most programming languages including Go (which I use on a daily basis btw) aim for these achievements of which Java is the OG.

Originally Posted by voldemort

FB ... why they invented GraphQL? At FB-scale, traditional API handling techniques just wasn't enough.

Any company of reasonable consumer size can benefit with scale. Microservices were the norm at Netflix first, even when they weren't part of MAANGA-speak. Good practices are adapted rather than invented.

Amazon is a better example actually. Most of their AWS solutions are Apache products - SQS (Kafka), S3 (HDFS), Dynamo (Cassandra), etc. They have invested a lot into these and made them much stable and resilient no doubt, but building on ideas is not inventing it (neither is it wrong of course). We build on what is available to us, but we cannot take credit if the new product is better than its predecessor.

Originally Posted by voldemort

MAANGA+ companies do cutting edge research ... which rest of the industry piggybacks off.

There is a significant number of small companies that these big firms have acquired over the years. May of the "interfaces"/ "frameworks" have actually come from these companies. To be honest we don't have enough data to say that statistically significant share of product portfolios were developed "in-house".

Originally Posted by voldemort

Focusing on the interview questions only gets you past the first couple of levels. Eventually you'll reach a point where you'll have to talk algorithms, runtime efficiencies etc. Because over there, time and space complexity matters!

I don't think so. "All" rounds including the first couple focus on algorithms, and this is really not about the concepts. I know because I have seen ex-colleagues who couldn't write quality code crack these MAANGA interviews 3 in a quarter (not just 1). If you looked at the way they wrote a simple file reader function, you would be surprised how they made it beyond even some "bar-raiser" rounds! So yes, there exists a cottage industry and a process to follow, that can get you there. Just like those infamous coaching centers of Kota.

Originally Posted by voldemort

People who make what are essentially glorified CRUD apps all their lives wouldn't understand.

Even CRUD ops would need good understanding of how data is stored by the DB, how they are indexed, so that they can write efficient queries. So again, we cannot causally relate good work with a reputed company.

[Bhokal]

Originally Posted by NiInJa

....

Originally Posted by Samurai

....

Seriously, I am loving the informed conversation that is going on in this thread.

[no_fear]

Originally Posted by am1m

Is this anger (not expressed by you, or your post, of course), while understandable, misdirected?

An excellent question to which I do not have the answer.

I love technology and the companies that are driving it. Be it Google, Facebook or Ducati, the ethos is for the betterment for mankind.

However, what I disagree with, is the current conflation that just because someone is working in IT / startup, any project they are working on is life changing, and thus they deserve to be awarded a high salary (cash + stocks) or a huge payout.

Every FAANG recruiter I met in my life has touted the following things - free food, free parking, free transport, free child care, free laundry...

The one thing they never discussed was the job scope. They gave me examples of how someone working at Google NBU (Next Billion Users) is revolutionizing Google Pay. But not once did they explain how, or what exactly was being done.

I interviewed with Uber back in 2016, with Facebook in 2022, for APAC head roles to implement their human security protocols. The interviews ended with me explaining the gaps in their controls / processes and what needs to be done. It was shocking to me that such renowned companies are busy spending money on free food, and touting 3 day WFH, stock options, and vesting, but have 0 company protocols on what work is to be done, when it comes to protecting their biggest assets - their employees.

Uber was in the limelight in India for numerous assault cases on women. Did any change happen? A big fat zero. All they did was hire some lawyers and PR firms to twist and turn the stories.

Are they inherently bad? Not at all. Tech has made our lives better and easier. No doubt about it. But the expectation that an IT employee should be richly rewarded of where he / she works, instead of what the person actually does, is the point of contention.

The only other industry that parallels the exuberance of tech is investment banking. And we know how well that industry imploded in 2008 and is still imploding even today. Bankers back in 2000s considered themselves the masters of the universe. Getting paid 30 mio USD for writing a bunch of asset backed securities structured products was the rage of the day.

Food for thought - when google / whatsapp / facebook goes offline or doesn't work, people don't panic and the whole economy doesn't collapse.

But if a bank goes bust - doom and gloom steps in. People lose jobs, countries go into recession and the economic world order collapses. So then, which is more valuable for our society - a boring bank or glorified tech ?